Digital Forensics: How Experts Uncover Doctored Images

from Scientific American

History is riddled with the remnants of photographic tampering. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Castro and Brezhnev each had photographs manipulated—from creating more heroic-looking poses to erasing enemies or bottles of beer.

In Stalin's day, such phony images required long hours of cumbersome work in a darkroom, but today anyone with a computer can readily produce fakes that can be very hard to detect.

Barely a month goes by without some newly uncovered fraudulent image making it into the news. In February, for instance, an award-winning photograph depicting a herd of endangered Tibetan antelope apparently undisturbed by a new high-speed train racing nearby was uncovered to be a fake.

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